Wait why is laziness vital to large data structures? Even with strict functions on strict, but persistent functions, you almost never copy the entire data struc

Wait why is laziness vital to large data structures? Even with strict functions on strict, but persistent functions, you almost never copy the entire data structure. For example a strict function on a strict persistent list that swaps the head of the list doesn't have to copy the entire tail of the list. The thing that laziness enables is short-circuiting, so e.g. a fold over the list can bail out early if necessary. But this is actually a minority of use cases for large data, since we often bound the size of data structures with something like a `take n` function for some integer n, which only processes n elements in a strict language.